Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
The bead Polly was trying to string slipped off the wire again, rolled across the fur, and dropped into the shadows next to Tess’s pallet.
“That’s the third one.” Tess didn’t move to retrieve it. She sat with her knees drawn up, her back to the warm stone wall of the healer’s cave, watching Polly’s hands like she was memorizing an escape route. “How do you do it and not throw the whole mess in the fire?”
“Practice.” She threaded a new bead, blue glass with a fleck of gold in it. “You drop about a hundred before your fingers learn the trick. Then a thousand more before they learn it well.”
“Sounds like a waste of a thousand beads.”
“They’re on the floor. You just pick them up again.”
Tess made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
It was the closest she came, quick and grudging, like even amusement had to be smuggled past a guard.
But it was more than she’d offered the first few days, when she’d flinched at the scrape of the cave’s leather flap and slept with the metal bar tucked against her side, and Polly counted it.
She counted all of the small thaws. The morning Tess had eaten without watching the door.
The afternoon she’d let Cera look at the half-healed gash on her forearm without a fight.
Each one felt like a bead threaded onto the wire, and she held them all together and tried not to think about how easily a whole strand could scatter.
“I’ve been thinking,” Tess said, and Polly looked up. Those two words, from Tess, were rarely small.
“About leaving. You said no one’d stop me, once there was a safe way off this rock.
” Tess picked at a loose thread on the blanket, not meeting her eyes.
“I want to believe that. I mostly don’t, but I want to.
And even if it’s true—safe where? I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t even know where I’ve been.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I was in a box for most of it.” The word was deliberately flat, the way Tess said the worst things, sanding them down until they’d fit through her teeth.
“Cargo hold, usually, or a fancy cabin with no window. They’d move me ship to ship and I never saw the outside of any of them.
I don’t know the names of the ships. I don’t know who owned them or where they were headed or whether the males who—” She stopped and swallowed hard.
“I don’t know anything that’d tell me which corners of the Empire to stay out of.
And you’re right, that’s the part that’ll get me caught again.
The not knowing. You can’t run from a thing you can’t name. ”
Polly set the wire down. She knew Tess was right. Safety wasn’t a place you arrived at once. It was a thing you had to keep choosing, and to choose it, you had to know where the danger was.
“You saw the outside of one of the ships,” she said. “The last one.”
Tess’s head came up.
“Even if it was only for a minute, even in the dark—you saw more of it than you think you did. People always do.” Polly tapped her chin.
“I wonder if Baralt could use that. He tried to trace it already, but he told Njkall that the identification was faked. But a fake identification is still information. If you could tell him what you saw, he might match it to something he already knows. He runs the whole landing field. Ships like that pass through more than once.”
“Baralt.” Tess turned the name over, suspicious of it. “The leader of law enforcement in Port Eyeja.”
“He’s Njkall’s friend. And he has a human mate, Izzie. I trust him.”
Tess was quiet for a long moment.
“He’s in Port Eyeja,” she said.
“Yes.”
“With the landing field.”
“Yes.”
Something crossed Tess’s face then, and she recognized it because it was the same thing she felt every single time the town was named—the instinct to shrink, to pull the small safe world in tighter, and avoid being seen.
She watched Tess battle it and watched the fear rise anyway, because that was how fear worked; it didn’t care what you needed.
Then Tess looked at her, and asked the thing Polly had been dreading since the word Baralt left her own mouth.
“Come with me.”
The cave went very quiet. The glow crystals hummed. Somewhere down the passage Cera was grinding something in a stone bowl, and Polly heard every turn of it because the rest of her had frozen.
Port Eyeja.
She’d only been there once, when she first arrived on Hothrest, and Njkall’s arm had been a wall between her and everything else, but she still remembered the town.
She remembered the smell of smoke and bodies and hot metal, and she remembered the males, so many species and sizes and eyes that slid over her and lingered.
And she remembered the landing field. The ships and the ramps and the steam and the throat-closing certainty that a ramp was a mouth and a hold was a throat and she had spent a year learning to breathe again only because she stayed far, far away from anything that could swallow her.
“I—” Her voice came out wrong. She stopped, steadied it, and it still came out wrong. “Tess, I don’t—”
“Right.” Tess’s face was already closing, already folding back into the flat guarded expression she’d had when she first came. Polly saw it happen and hated it. “No. Forget it. It was stupid to ask. You’ve got your safe little life up here and I shouldn’t—”
“That’s not—”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t. Tess reached down beside the pallet and fished out the dropped bead and held it out on her palm like an offering. Here, take your pretty thing back, let’s pretend I never opened my mouth. “I’ll figure it out. I always do. I don’t need—”
And there it was.
I don’t need.
She had said those exact words, in that exact tone, because needing was the trap. Needing was the thing that could be taken away and used against you, and so you learned to say I don’t need before anyone could prove you did. And because she’d said it, she knew it meant the opposite.
She looked at Tess’s extended hand, and the tight-jawed pride of a woman getting ready to be disappointed by one more person, and she took a deep, steadying breath, and did the most terrifying thing she’d done in a long time.
“I’ll go,” she said.
Tess’s eyes flew to her face.
“What?”
“To the port. With you. We’ll talk to Baralt together.” Her heart was pounding and her hands were damp, but she kept her voice level. “You’re right. You need information, and he’s the best chance we’ve got to get it.”
“You don’t have to—”
“No, I don’t,” she agreed. She picked up a bead of her own and rolled it across her palm, just to keep her hands busy while she made herself say it.
“But I want to. Because you asked me, and because I don’t want you to go there alone.
And…” She stopped, but she’d come this far, she might as well finish it.
“And because I need to go. For myself. I need to know I can.”
“Oh,” Tess said softly, all of the anger gone. “That.”
Polly smiled a little.
“Yes. That. I’ve spent a year staying up here.
Being careful. Staying where I felt safe.
I needed to, for a while.” Njkall had stood between her and the whole world when she couldn’t stand up for herself, and it had been the thing that let her, eventually, learn to stand on her own. “Now I think I need to go.”
Tess searched her face for a long moment, and then nodded.
“When?” she asked.
“I’ll ask Njkall.”
“Is he back from the port?”
“I don’t know. If not, tomorrow morning.”
“And if he says no?”
She shook her head.
“He won’t.”
Njkall was already in their quarters when she returned, his white fur streaked with fresh snow, the ice crystals melting in his mane.
She watched him shake it off, the long lines of his body shifting beneath the thick pelt, and her mind went briefly, helplessly, back to last night, to the heat of his mouth and the way he had answered her kiss with a hunger that had shaken them both.
Then she remembered why she was here and what she had to say, and her nerves woke back up, twisting in her belly.
He turned towards her with a small smile on his face, the kind that meant he was glad to see her, and she steeled herself to speak before he could get a word out first.
“I’m going to Port Eyeja,” she blurted out.